April 2007 Archives

A familiar story: you prefer Thunderbird but most of the G-men use Outlook and keep sending you meeting invites that come out as gibberish. You'd also like to be able to update your personal or work calendar whilst not on location. This stay in synch with GCal and Thunderbird article promises to do all that for you.

I've taken all the necessary steps; now I need to get into the office and send myself a meeting invite from Outlook and see if the wording on the tin is correct..

Just in case you ever wondered, "Who does make the best English mustard?" I performed a blind test on a sample set of 2 people (me and my housemate) to answer that very question. We tried three brands: Taylors, Colmans & Sainsburys own brand. The clear winner by a long margin was ... Colmans with Sainbury's own brand second and Taylors really not at all interesting. So now you know.

I wrote up about Diino's online storage service a while ago. However, having had a look around the interweb once again, I've found a few more providers and this excellent article in the New York Times pointed me in the direction of Mozy and Carbonite. I'm trialing both - Mozy give you 2GB storage for free, whilst Carbonite give you a 15 day free trial. Both are about the same price at about USD50 per year (and at the current exchange rate, that's well cheap).

Both are Windows specific, but there is plans for Mac/Linux variation for Carbonite. Not sure about Mozy on that front. Carbonite is incredibly easy to use: everything is automated, so it's ideal for the non-geeks out there. Mozy is more configurable, and my preferred choice at the moment. And seeing as I am using the free version, I've used the referral link the supply and if 4 people sign up using that I get another 1GB of free storage space. I just need 20 or so referrals and I can back up everything I want to for free!

Now to persuade my folks and siblings to use some form of backup so I don't have to explain to them they've lost all their photos / letters / emails when one of the seven dwarfs* decides to take a hammer to their PC...